A simple self-reflection intervention boosts the detection of targeted advertising

Abstract Online platforms’ data give advertisers the ability to “microtarget” recipients’ personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate. One possible response is to raise awareness for and resilience against such manipulative strategies through psychological inoculation. Two online experiments (total $$N= 828$$ N = 828 ) demonstrated that a short, simple intervention prompting participants to reflect on an attribute of their own personality—by completing a short personality questionnaire—boosted their ability to accurately identify ads that were targeted at them by up to 26 percentage points. Accuracy increased even without personalized feedback, but merely providing a description of the targeted personality dimension did not improve accuracy. We argue that such a “boosting approach,” which here aims to improve people’s competence to detect manipulative strategies themselves, should be part of a policy mix aiming to increase platforms’ transparency and user autonomy

Influence and seepage:An evidence-resistant minority can affect public opinion and scientific belief formation

Some well-established scientific findings may be rejected by vocal minorities because the evidence is in conflict with political views or economic interests. For example, the tobacco industry denied the medical consensus on the harms of smoking for decades, and the clear evidence about human-caused climate change is currently being rejected by many politicians and think tanks that oppose regulatory action. We present an agent-based model of the processes by which denial of climate change can occur, how opinions that run counter to the evidence can affect the scientific community, and how denial can alter the public discourse. The model involves an ensemble of Bayesian agents, representing the scientific community, that are presented with the emerging historical evidence of climate change and that also communicate the evidence to each other. Over time, the scientific community comes to agreement that the climate is changing. When a minority of agents is introduced that is resistant to the evidence, but that enter into the scientific discussion, the simulated scientific community still acquires firm knowledge but consensus formation is delayed. When both types of agents are communicating with the general public, the public remains ambivalent about the reality of climate change. The model captures essential aspects of the actual evolution of scientific and public opinion during the last 4 decades

On the definition and identifiability of the alleged “hiatus” in global warming

Recent public debate and the scientific literature have frequently cited a “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. Yet, multiple sources of evidence show that climate change continues unabated, raising questions about the status of the “hiatus”. To examine whether the notion of a “hiatus” is justified by the available data, we first document that there are multiple definitions of the “hiatus” in the literature, with its presumed onset spanning a decade. For each of these definitions we compare the associated temperature trend against trends of equivalent length in the entire record of modern global warming. The analysis shows that the “hiatus” trends are encompassed within the overall distribution of observed trends. We next assess the magnitude and significance of all possible trends up to 25 years duration looking backwards from each year over the past 30 years. At every year during the past 30 years, the immediately preceding warming trend was always significant when 17 years (or more) were included in the calculation, alleged “hiatus” periods notwithstanding. If current definitions of the “pause” used in the literature are applied to the historical record, then the climate system “paused” for more than 1/3 of the period during which temperatures rose 0.6 K

Papers please: Predictive factors of national and international attitudes toward immunity and vaccination passports. Online representative surveys

BACKGROUND: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries are introducing digital passports that allow citizens to return to normal activities if they were previously infected with (immunity passport) or vaccinated against (vaccination passport) SARS-CoV-2. To be effective, policy decision-makers must know whether these passports will be widely accepted by the public and under what conditions. This study focuses attention on immunity passports, as these may prove useful in countries both with and without an existing COVID-19 vaccination program; however, our general findings also extend to vaccination passports. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to assess attitudes toward the introduction of immunity passports in six countries, and determine what social, personal, and contextual factors predicted their support. METHODS: We collected 13,678 participants through online representative sampling across six countries—Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom—during April to May of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and assessed attitudes and support for the introduction of immunity passports. RESULTS: Immunity passport support was moderate to low, being the highest in Germany (775/1507 participants, 51.43%) and the United Kingdom (759/1484, 51.15%); followed by Taiwan (2841/5989, 47.44%), Australia (963/2086, 46.16%), and Spain (693/1491, 46.48%); and was the lowest in Japan (241/1081, 22.94%). Bayesian generalized linear mixed effects modeling was used to assess predictive factors for immunity passport support across countries. International results showed neoliberal worldviews (odds ratio [OR] 1.17, 95% CI 1.13-1.22), personal concern (OR 1.07, 95% CI 1.00-1.16), perceived virus severity (OR 1.07, 95% CI 1.01-1.14), the fairness of immunity passports (OR 2.51, 95% CI 2.36-2.66), liking immunity passports (OR 2.77, 95% CI 2.61-2.94), and a willingness to become infected to gain an immunity passport (OR 1.6, 95% CI 1.51-1.68) were all predictive factors of immunity passport support. By contrast, gender (woman; OR 0.9, 95% CI 0.82-0.98), immunity passport concern (OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.57-0.65), and risk of harm to society (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.67-0.76) predicted a decrease in support for immunity passports. Minor differences in predictive factors were found between countries and results were modeled separately to provide national accounts of these data. CONCLUSIONS: Our research suggests that support for immunity passports is predicted by the personal benefits and societal risks they confer. These findings generalized across six countries and may also prove informative for the introduction of vaccination passports, helping policymakers to introduce effective COVID-19 passport policies in these six countries and around the world